CHAPTER III Nor CHARACTERS, BUT ATTITUDES.
Not Characters, But Attitudes CHAPTER III I ATTITUDES Only attitudes, and this explains how the same (that is, what we take for the same) character, regarded from one point of view will excite our admiration, and from another, our amusement. A single man can exhibit all attitudes, which is to say, all characters, and consequently, whether simultaneously or alternately, those which are utterly contradictory. But the habit of this or that attitude becomes so well established, and transmitted by heredity, education or example, that it becomes, as it were, ankylosed within the organism, which ends by exhibiting so restricted a number of these attitudes that it seems unable to break away from them, and thenceforward they produce that deceptive illusion which is called a Character. Thus each of us, having potentially all the mental attitudes, has the whole human soul, always and everywhere the same in itself, since complete, since formed in the image of the Infinite, as the Biblical legend has so profoundly expressed it.* Also, according to Plato, Aristotle and Christianity, it is God whom we love in each human being; that is to say, that human being in his completeness. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," says the Gospel, and nothing can be more natural, since in his completeness he is like yourself and you are identical with him. "Love" here signifies "see" or "recognize," recognize the image, faithful and complete, of God. Those who "having eyes yet see not," have in their eyes a "beam," that of the cross, to which, exalting themselves as judges, they despite St. Paul, despite the Gospel condemn their neighbor, which is to say God, which is to say themselves transcendentally. No, the lover does not create for himself illusions as to the beloved, evidences of his own passion. On the contrary, it is he alone who shows himself lucid, and his admiring words reveal to his beloved many sides of her nature of which she herself was unaware. . Also, this link which every moralist instinctively seeks, and which connects all the Personages of fiction and history, all the "characters" in a sort of logical succession in which we may see them spring one from another, this link, this indefinable all-essential which shall be called HUMANUM, Bossuet thought he discovered in LOVE, root of all passions, and La Rochefoucauld, turning toward the solitude in which he had isolated the human heart, in SELF-LOVE; our moderns see it incontestably in SEXUAL LOVE, the primitive act of our life, wherein lie the problems of heredity and of races, which interest them so deeply. The old mediaeval theology said, in a broader sense, DIVINE LOVE, or the HOLY SPIRIT, and it identified under this term the reciprocal love of the two other Divine Persons, the love of all Three for man and that of man for Them, and for his neighbor through love of Them, the animating principle of creation, inspirer of minds and giver of wisdom and knowledge, even that of the human Word and its modifications, the languages; grace in all senses of the word. For the common herd, and for many writers, a Character is constituted, even firmly established, as soon as three or four characteristic aspects are shown, connected with one another by the thread of a logical idea relating them in cause and effect. Tragedy and Comedy, on the contrary, exist but to demonstrate how sad and ridiculous a thing it is, subjectively or objectively, to BE but one poor character, but one ankylosed attitude ! Now, in their totality, these attitudes, through which every man worthy of the name can or originally could pass; through which passes, at least in imagination, the genius of the "poet of a thousand souls," these diverse attitudes, which it is his mission to show us, each in turn, in his works, in order to break our enslaving "ankylosis," these attitudes may be counted, as well as those of the body. Have we not, moreover, already reduced to the number of 36 their conflicts? Since they may be counted, they may be classified. No one has succeeded, no one should succeed in counting and conveniently distributing "characters" in the insulated sense in which the word is commonly used. It is but right that such semblances, mistaken for individual beings, should vanish from the hands which would restrain and put them in cages. But the "attitudes" which are not persons, but ephemeral roles, nothing prevents our enumerating them. From the beginning, the people of the drama have been brought on and off in spite of themselves, so to speak, to be labelled and ticketed, very imperfectly, I admit, because of their excessively conventionalized life, a life having one side only, for the personage of drama is concerned only with that side which he turns toward the audience, the others, like those of the moon, remaining invisible! The OCCUPATIONS of the stage have been counted. And this term evokes curiously that of those "Professional Types" which began in the Middle Comedy of the Greeks, with its Fishvendor, its Courtesan, its brutal Soldier, its Parasite, its Cook, the drama of observation, before, in the New Comedy of Menander, the study of more individualized characters was approached. It is to Professional Types, moreover, that the herd clings. To the question, "What is Mr. Soand- So?" three people out of four will reply, "He is an attorney," or "He is a shoe-maker." Apparently they would reply, if asked about St. Matthew, "He was a clerk," or of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "He was a servant." From what does this come, if not from the fact that such a classification, so easy, corresponds to a primary psychological tendency, albeit a vulgar one? Clearly it is easier to recognize a justice in his official robe than a just person seated among the accused; a Jesuit in his professional garb than a Tartufe also ever-faithful to Success, and today perhaps chanting the songs of the "International!" From the day when there were united for the first time, in a new form of art (which we call the comedy of manners), several examples of the same trade or profession, it became very neces sary to discern in them several roles in the same rank; for example, given a ministerial bureau, there will almost inevitably be found therein the ill-tempered, the jocose and waggish, the beastof- burden, etc., all a little colored by whichever of these characters remains attached to their chief. These are like moral liveries, which the PERSONNEL distribute among themselves, at first with some fumbling, but with which each of them identifies himself little by little, according to the instinctive demand and pressure of the environment. The same phenomenon is repeated in the habitues of a salon, of a public place, of the editorial rooms of a journal, among the workmen of a farm or shop, the sailors on a vessel, the members of an association, commission, academy, or any group. In this entertaining distribution of roles one can perceive the birth of Traditional Characters. In turn, the complete series of these Traditional Characters in their professional or social MILIEU (as the Clerks of Balzac), could be compared to the series, equally complete, of another MILIEU, and again of others; thus was gathered the collection which the author called the COM&DIE HUMAINE. The fact of having been able to transport, true to himself, from one of these MILIEUX (a bureau) to another (a boulevard), then a third (a bank or newspaper or the world of women) his Bixiou, for example, proves that he has given him, in a broader sense than we realize, a Human Character. Nevertheless it is but a role become a man, this Bixiou; one might almost say it is the mere face of an actor, such as Daudet's Delobelle. Remarking this ankylosis in a single attitude, that of sarcasm, what reader has not said to himself that there should be something else in Bixiou than the side Balzac has shown us? And that "something else" certainly existed in the back of the author's mind. The exaggeration of the type has here a hyperbolic aspect, and necessarily so. Balzac overdraws it at this point only through condescension toward us, and in order to give us that impression of "character" which we expect and understand. Only by means of such deceptive representations do we perceive it, and so the other sides of the character are deliberately thrust back into the shadow. They are, I say, thrust back, but not suppressed. For, with a great writer, or, what comes to the same thing, in a great legend, the production not of the masses, but of anonymous genius, these "other sides" are never lost; it is they which permit the author, when he wishes, to present with verisimilitude his personage in an attitude absolutely opposed to the first one. Whereas, in such a VOLTE-FACE, the writer who is a mere arranger of puppets never fails to contradict or mutilate his first conception, to the bewilderment of his public. Furthermore, it is, I say, precisely back of the most pronounced '"character" that we find that delicate play of light and shade which gives it life and verisimilitude. Unlike the uniformity of the Corneillean heroes, unlike the crude contrasts of the Hugoesque figures with their too-simple dualism, some naif detail of a poem or a hagiography renders comprehensible and akin to us a humanity nevertheless so superhuman. What a child-like heart is revealed by the tears of the hard Achilles, or by the jokes of the audacious spouse of the Lady Poverty! II ROLES AND OCCUPATIONS; PROFESSIONAL AND TRADITIONAL TYPES; CHARACTER-TYPES; CHARACTERS MORE INDIVIDUALIZED, AND PORTRAITS. Let us recapitulate the seven aspects through which passes, by means of contrasts, the generation of "Characters" in literature. (1) Roles. These are hardly more than the persons of the verb in grammar, united to the active or passive voice, as: the Pretagonist, the Antagonist, the disputed Object (a woman loved by two rivals, a child in a divorce, a prince between two courtesans, a judge solicited by both parties), the PERSONNAGE-LIEN or Connecting Character, who is only the preceding passed from the passive to the active voice (the common friend of two combatants, the mother of brothers at enmity), then the Instigator or Instigators (confidant, confessor, counsellor, mentor, lago), and the Instrument or Instruments (messenger, angel, executioner, hired assassin, mob), and finally the Chorus (the odious thesis-characters of Ibsen and Dumas FILS, the SERMONNEUR of the Miracles, part of the RAISONNEURS, neighbors, witnessess), plus the DEUS-EX-MACHINA (prologue-characters, the narrator, the letter lost and found, the useful coincidence, etc.). (2) Occupations. An empirical attempt of the comedians to group themselves, and of which they have taken the more account as they are obliged to seek therein, in default of masks or make-up sufficiently exaggerated, the "physical means" necessary to the material representation of the real elements of character. This division is to the preceding almost what the contingent physiognomy is to the moral life. Here, nevertheless, presented only with a little more of order than has been shown heretofore, are the ordinary titles, whose artificial spirit I have scrupulously respected: Young Princesses (Iphigenia, Zaira) and Ingenues (Agnes). JBUNES PREMIERS, Lovers (the Marquis de Presles, the Delaunays, Don John of Austria). JEUNES PREMIERES, Feminine Lovers (Philiberte, Dona Sol). These border upon Premier Roles (Thisbe, Marion Delorme, Countess Almaviva, Celimne, Almaviva, Don Juan, Alceste, Buridan) and upon Great Princesses (Hermione, Camille). PREMIERS ROLES (Ruy-Blas, Mary Tudor, Lucretia Borgia, Marguerite de Bourgogne). Premier Character Roles (Don Ruy Gomez, Don Quexada). RA1SONNEURS (Philante). Noble Fathers (the Gerontes of "Le Menteur" and "Le Joueur," Boursault's Aesop, Verdelet in "Le Gendre de M. Poirier"). Dotards and Dolts (Geronte in "Le Legataire," Argante in "Les Fourberies"). Financiers (Turcaret, M. de Sottenville, M. Guillaume in "Patelin"). Tertiary Roles (traitors and tyrants, Don Salluste, Saltabadil, the deceived husbands and villains of modern drama, Begearss). Premier Comic Roles (Figaro, Giboyer, I'lntime, Gros- Rene, Sganarelle in "Le Festin de Pierre," Scapin in "Les Fourberies"), and Secondary Comic Roles (all the valets and jesters except that of the "Legataire," which is a premier; Jodelet in "Les Precieuses," the Marquis in "Le Joueur," Covielle, Mascarille in "Depit," Dandin in "Les Plaideurs," M. Loyal, Thomas Diaforus). Soubrettes, etc. As we see, a well-turned figure, hollow features or a round paunch are sufficient to cause passage from one of these categories into another. I refrain from here taking account of distinctions altogether local and peculiar. (3) Professional Types in which social rank, so dear to the vulgar, emerges from the preceding classification : The Valet and the Marquis (our "snob") from the Premier and Secondary Comedy Roles; the Pedant and the Tutor from the "Dotards," the Tyrant from the Tertiary Roles, the Courtesan from the Premier Roles, etc. Now let us add to these certain specializations particularly well carried out: the Molieresque Doctor, the Cook of Greek drama (that ancestor of the innkeepers and cooks of Dumas, of "La Reine Pedauque" and of "Cyrano"), the Athenian Fish-vendor, the boastful Soldier, the Parasite, the antique Slave (forerunner of the Valet), the Spanish Go-between, the Gendarme (escaped from the puppet-theatre), our Usurer, our Functionary, etc. (4) But such of these Professional Types as appeared in the "Occupations" of comedy there contend, obscurely mingled, with the Traditional Types admired in former days, and who, under the new names fastened like masks upon their faded visages, yet fill, without the public's observing it, about three-fourths of the drama (and, I would say, of modern literature). Here is Lelio, or the Lover, a slightly sad JEUNE PREMIER. Here, more naif, is Pierrot, shall we call him Gringoire for a change? Let us hasten on to Jocrisse, the Foolish Servant, past Palisse, Cadet- Roussel, Calino and the primitive Harlequin (for the present shrewd Harlequin rejoins, by way of Mascarille and the valets, one of the two types of Slave which in the plays of Aristophanes form an antithesis to the credulous and the dupe). Polichinelle, fighter and brawler^ reappears, a little more obscene, in Karagheuz, and more filthy in Ubu. The sly Columbine returns to the professional type of soubrette, but beside her, Isabelle, from whom come the folk of the JEUNES PREMIERES, is but too much a "traditional!" (5) Character-Types ! Here, in brief, is everything the public demands. It will, for a long time to come, prefer these to more exact studies. Dickens, Daudet, and, most of the time, Zola, have but built upon some vicious habit or some gross and conspicuous trait of the traditional puppet; Nana, we might say, is the eternal Courtesan, Saccard is the Financier, according to the invariable formula from Lesage to Mirbeau. Renee springs especially from the department of Occupations, a radiation from the Feminine Lovers, and she alone tempted momentarily from the enormous work of the Rougon-Macquart Family our great national actress, so admirably identified with her "occupation" that she is always cited in connection with it. She has realized, we say it without irony, the perfection of her art. It is forbidden to the actor to raise himself higher, and he exercises thereby a regrettable influence not only upon the stage, where the evil remains well restrained, but unhappily upon literature, even the most serious, thence upon history also, and through it upon the tendency of an age fallen into the stupidity of taking .the player for an artist, the hypocrite for a poet "bleeding with sincerity," and the banal "occupation" for a new and liberating conception of life. It is, moreover, merely in a spirit of concession that I have accorded this Paragraph 5 to Character- Types, since, in the final analysis, they all come from the two preceding (Professional Types and Traditional Types). (6) The Stage is closed to Characters More Individualized. Tartufe and the better heroes of Shakespeare had access to it only because their authors happened upon it before them. I say, observe, "more individualized," and not simply "individual." We may partially discover the reason above, apropos of Balzac. In the case of characters of whom he has tried to tell, if not everything, at least too much at one time, he has made them indistinct, and they mingle in a confusion wherein we wander among a vague crowd of human beings. (7) The Portrait in reality, be it drawn from nature by a Balzac, be it by a historian exceptionally conscientiqu^, in losing its generality loses also, contradictory as it may appear, something of its clearness. It proves to be less truthful, as Aristotle has already remarked, than the poetical representation of men and events. Unless, of course, it follows the usual process; in that case it will embrace in a complete view the career of an illustrious man, or at least consider a very large part of it,- in order to exhibit him camped in a certain immobile and striking posture of soul; M. Masson has done thus with his Bonapartes. The Imperfect of the Indicative is here a great resource. The Portrait corresponds in this manner to one of the Traditional Types, and ranges itself in one of the ever-ready pigeonholes under the eternal labels: The Chivalrous, The Debonnaire, The Haughty, The Tyrant, The Sage, The Lion (today the Superman). The historic epithets attached to the names of so many princes, and SO LITTLE VARIED, are a curious evidence of this tendency. III NEW COMBINATIONS If each one of the seven, or rather of the six classes which we have just extracted one from another, encroaches upon its neighbors, it will nevertheless be observed that this does not result in confusion. There is not even combination among them, there is only juxtaposition, only mosaic, owing to the unskilfulness of their authors. Each of these classes will offer, according to the angle from which the writer considers its contents: 1st: Comic Characters. 2nd: Tragic Characters. 3rd : Serious Characters, a sort of hybrid utilized at will by tragedy and comedy, by satire and by historical romance and poetry. 4th : Among Comic Characters a particularly interesting series, Parody Characters. These were originally tragic characters, who have been transferred from right to left, so to speak, such as Don Quixote and his numerous but too-feeble posterity. Ariosto and his French and Italian predecessors, the Greek SATYRIQUE drama and our modern burlesque have left much to be done. 5th : Symmetrically opposite, amid the Tragic Characters, will be the Paradoxical Characters, in former days farcical, but now presented in a pathetic light. The infirmities of Richard III or of Quasimodo give us as yet only physical examples, but Dickens and Daudet are full of caricatures which, if not tragic, are at least pitiful. We might still distinguish, 6th, Characters heretofore odious, presented sympathetically: The thief Jean Valjean, the daughters of Romanticism and Naturalism, heirs of Mary Magdalene; the hypocrite in "Le Cure de Village" and in many English novels. Then, 7th (recommended to anarchists, innovators and professional "free souls"), Characters heretofore sympathetic, presented under a repugnant or despicable aspect; we have had many of them within recent years, but others remain; working men, children, etc. On the comic side we shall have, 8th, to paint ridiculously the characters ordinarily spared, as the betrothed young girl, the man of theses. And, 9th, to present seriously and sympathetically Characters heretofore grotesque. It has been done for the deceived husband and the jealous lover; there is nothing to prevent doing it for the usurer, the undertaker, and many others. These changes of place will be found fecund in all the Literature of Character, and not alone, as might be supposed, in drama and romance. A Michelet, for example, has not seldom done thus, in his design of lightening the unconscious remorses of our nation. There is nothing more malleable in this respect than history, so long as it has not grown and hardened into a myth (more truthful because the expression of the collective consciousness); a Clytemnestra obviously does not so readily lend herself to this treatment as a Madame Syveton. Real or imaginary, lofty or trivial, vague or clearly drawn, often diverse in their portraits, sometimes contradictory of aspect, I have evoked these human Figures from out the centuries and from all parts of the globe. For we must rid ourselves, as I have realized, before it is too late, of our false ideas concerning superior and inferior races, and welcome contact with all humanity. The dominance, recent enough and, I am convinced, unprecedented for intrigue and destructiveness, of Occidental and notably Protestant or free-thinking peoples, corresponds to an equal and moreover logical impotence in original and durable creation. Many a reduced or subjugated race, such as the Italian or the Hindu, represents well enough what a poet of genius becomes, or an ill-dressed hero, introduced into the parlor of rich and vulgar money-worshippers, mocking and scornful; they will bewilder him with their figures, complacently watch him envelope himself in silence and ennui; will despoil him, if he still possesses anything, under the pretext of enriching him, and chuckle afterward over having so easily vanquished him. There is nothing to prevent the situation being some day reversed, and that perhaps sooner than we expect ; the premonitions of it are already appearing throughout the world; strange surprises are in store, and very probably, in such an event, the new order of things will annihilate, until but a memory remains of it, this ugly and stupid age of PARVENUS, which will meet the fate of so many other vainglorious barbarisms, likewise proud of their industries, their arms and their wealth. From the great pile-built cities of China, from the immemorial records of Peru and Egypt, from Central Africa, rich in traditions too long disdained, from the humblest "primitives," from the chronicles of Iran, from fiery Malaysia, from paradoxical Japan and from reviving Arabia; from the snow huts of Lapland, the streets of Stamboul, the paths of Ceylon and the plateaux of Thibet; from the 72 books of the two Testaments, from the Greek and Latin literatures, modern as well as ancient, from Norse and Finnish songs and from all the mythologies; finally from the remotest corners of occidental civilization, and all the writings which it has set down in modern languages, even to the most recent, and scattered over the world, O sisters, O brothers, from all regions of earth, from the future as well as the past, in your motley and ever-changing costumes or your lamentable and touching nudity, from all the ranks from which you have turned at my appeal, from all the ages of life when you have sent out a cry which has reached me, I have gathered you, in unforeseen groups where our sad modern menagerie, in its hopeless decay, reaches out its hands to the most radiant Goddess of the Dawn, where the prattling infant, the greybeard and the light-o'-love become of a sudden identical ! I am aware that an interminable procession of more and more banal replicas will follow after. But the unison of their monotonous voices will not drive away those detached and heretofore unknown figures, hastening from out the mass, and astonished to find themselves suddenly in the light. Sometimes, too, my calculations having apparently permitted me to silhouette a certain type between two related ones, I have nevertheless summoned it in vain; nothing appears, from literature or zodiacs, in that lacuna of human personality! We shall march, O reader, with a sure step toward silent and lonely regions. And there, beneath the brush of a virgin land, we shall discover, slumbering, the Unpublished Being. She will awake when we take her by the hand. And this heroine of the Poet to come, this Eve of future endless maternities, we shall bring back through the ranks of astonished Lovelaces, to the still empty pedestal where her Figure, all unblemished, shall shine among the too-conventional attitudes of her companions. Thus shall we bring forward ten, a hundred, a thousand and more, exactly 369, 12,915, 154,980, augmenting the unprecedented chorus disposed at the feet of Her who shall summarize them all in her perfection, nevertheless so human.